Narrow Results

In recent years, recognition that bogus self-employment is rapidly growing, not least because of the advent of what has been called the ‘gig,’ ‘sharing’ or ‘collaborative’ economy, has led governments to search for ways to tackle this form of dependent self-employment that is widely viewed as diminishing the quality of working conditions. Until now, however, there have been few ex-post evaluations of policy initiatives that seek to tackle this phenomenon. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide one of the first ex-post evaluations by examining the outcomes of a 2016 legislative initiative in Romania to tackle bogus self-employment. Reporting both descriptive statistics and OLS regression analysis on monthly official data from August 2014 to August 2016, the finding is that while other business types and waged employment rates followed a similar trend to the years before the introduction of the new legislation, the number of self-employed started a negative trend after the new legislation was announced. After controlling for other indicators related to the economy (i.e. GDP) and labor market (i.e. employees, other companies, vacancy rates), the impact of the new legislation on the self-employed remains negative, offering reasonable grounds for assuming bogus self-employed was lowered by the new legislation. The paper concludes by discussing the wider implications of these findings.

Through the methodology of auto-ethnographical case study, this research includes a review of the entrepreneurial nature of the current U.S. workforce and explores the experiences and insights of a micro-entrepreneur to identify challenges faced by many freelance, gig workers, and other micro-entrepreneurs in the current economy. The study consolidates the challenges faced by the micro-entrepreneur into four key areas: formulating and executing strategy, constructing a value web, utilizing mentors and negotiating ambiguity in business. These unique challenges center on the start-up, development and operation of a small business, and are used to provide curricular and pedagogical recommendations for higher education to better serve this burgeoning sector of the workforce.

To explore the hot spots and trends of domestic and foreign research on the gig economy, this paper uses CiteSpace software to visually analyze the Chinese and English literature on this topic selected from CNKI and WOS databases. It is found that the gig economy generally refers to the digital gig economy based on the network platform in the Internet era. Research in this field officially started in 2016. A highly productive group of domestic and international authors has not yet been formed. The research institutions are mainly universities, and the cooperation between English research institutions is closer. Global-developed countries and domestically developed cities are the main force of research in this field. Compared with some countries, such as the US and the UK, China still has more room for development in terms of case studies and empirical research. The research on the gig economy focuses on the following points: first, the connotation of the gig economy; second, the relationship between the gig economy and the sharing economy, the digital economy, the platform economy, and their impact on the economy and society; third, the opportunities and challenges in the gig economy; fourth, the advantages and disadvantages of Internet technology in the gig economy network platform; finally, the new legislation needs under the gig economy, etc. Overwork, collective action of gig workers, and service performance of gig jobs are the latest research trends in this field.